It's The Substance Stupid
By U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings
Originally published in the Charleston Post and Courier, January 13, 2003
The 108th Congress opens this week with the ouster of Trent Lott and Republicans congratulating themselves on becoming sensitive to discrimination. But when it comes to race, Republicans have always been great on symbols but short on substance. President Reagan launched his campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where they buried civil rights workers, as a "tipping of the hat" to the Southern Strategy. President Bush now kicks off his campaign for the minority vote by hailing "founding ideals"; various Republican senators chime in harkening "the spirit of Abraham Lincoln"; and Senator George Allen of Virginia pronounces the benediction: "The United States Senate has buried, graveyard dead and gone, the days of discrimination and segregation." We'll see.
When it comes to discrimination, no one has room to talk. I have been a recent target of talking heads, attacking my words while ignoring my record. But as a 50-year public servant in the South, let me qualify on substance.
I was first elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1948 when Strom Thurmond ran for president. Racism was rampant. By court order, African Americans had just been permitted to vote in the all-white Democratic primary, and leading candidates withdrew from the primary rather than have blacks vote for them. To severe criticism, I stayed in. Harassing those who stayed in, the local newspaper published a questionnaire: "Do you or do you not solicit the Negro vote?" My answer: Do you or do you not solicit black advertisers and subscribers to your newspaper?
On Friday after my successful election, I was taken by the school superintendent to Freedom School for black children. At the time, Plessy vs Ferguson - separate but equal - was the law of the land. The school was a square, one-room structure with a class in each corner and a potbellied stove in the middle. There was one teacher for the four classes. Shocked at such discrimination, I became a champion of the sales tax to equalize black and white schools. But in the legislature I could not get senators to join in a House/Senate Committee to provide for the equalization, so I chaired a House Committee. We wrote a three percent sales tax for public schools, and Governor James F. Byrnes led the fight for its passage.
Also during that time, the State Constitution forbade women to vote, so I introduced a resolution to repeal that amendment. When I introduced an anti-lynching bill, members staged a walkout from the chamber, but it passed the following year. I proposed a black member for the local school board and at first had the majority of the delegation's support committed. But then a Lutheran minister was proposed in opposition, defeating my candidate and forcing me to vote against my own minister. Later, when I ran for Lieutenant Governor in 1954, my opponent ran ads, "Hollings is for integration".
Governor Byrnes appointed me "of counsel" at the arguments in Brown vs. The Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court. When I heard NAACP lawyer George Hayes argue how black soldiers went to the war to fight on the front lines in Europe, and then came home and were forced to the back of the bus, I knew segregation in and of itself was wrong; that there is not a white race, a black race, but only one race: the human race.
As Governor, I integrated the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division and presided over all the sit-ins and marches of Martin Luther King and the NAACP - all without the loss of life or anyone hurt. I literally broke up and locked up the Ku Klux Klan in my state. No other Southern governor could claim this at the time.
In October 1962, when Governor Barnett of Mississippi insisted I lead a motorcade to Oxford in defiance of the integration of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi, I refused. Forty years ago this month, I calmed the waters leading to the peaceful integration of Clemson University by Harvey Gantt.
I remember right after Martin Luther King was shot, going to the largest black high school in my state. The principal's son, an Annapolis Midshipman, made a moving address to the student body and I asked who appointed him to the Naval Academy. He didn't answer. I persisted and finally his father said, "I couldn't get a member of the South Carolina Congressional Delegation to appoint him, so Hubert Humphrey did." What goes around comes around. My record of appointing minorities to the service academies rivals that of many members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
In 1969 I went on hunger tours in South Carolina and wrote The Case Against Hunger. This gave an acceptance to the food stamp program and led to the adoption of Women Infants and Children feeding. I launched one of the nation's first comprehensive health centers in South Carolina. I was soundly criticized by my senior colleague when I argued for the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982. I appointed the first black to head a Senate Committee; the first in the South to be director of the Farm Security Agency; the first to be a U.S. Marshal; the first to be a U.S. District Judge in the South and the first black female District Judge.
In the 1990s I called for the Confederate flag to be taken down from the Statehouse in Columbia. It had been put up by a concurrent resolution by the Legislature without my signature as Governor, although when Republicans try to discredit me they leave that part out. I also called for allowing women into the Citadel, because no institution receiving public funds should discriminate.
It's with this record that I have been elected to the U.S. Senate seven times. But for years Republicans have followed the credo of Nixon's Republican Attorney General, John Mitchell: "Watch what we do, not what we say." Blacks see Republicans coming to office on the most blatant racism - and then undermining programs that may lift them up.
The first thing Presidents Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 did was to propose weakening or eliminating programs like food stamps, school lunches, education's Title I for the Disadvantaged, Women Infants and Children's feeding, comprehensive health centers, Medicaid, and housing.
Take Head Start. Countless studies show children who participate in it enter school better prepared, are more likely to complete high school, and eventually earn a higher income than those who do not. Obviously, we have a resounding need to improve education. But Head Start only reaches 60 percent of eligible children, and the budget submitted by President Bush this year would cut 2,800 children from the program. Minorities can see that Dick Cheney, as a member of Congress, voted against Head Start but readily finds $254 million in tax cuts for Enron.
And Republicans will never get the minority vote proposing vouchers for private schools. Ashley Hall School, where Barbara Bush attended, costs $11,000 a year. A $2,500 voucher is like throwing a 50-yard line to a woman 100 yards off shore. High quality public schools are the only chance low-income Americans have, yet President Bush proposed to cut $90 million from his own education bill.
True, there are a few exceptions. Bob Dole helped save food stamps. Kit Bond helped save the Community Health Centers. The fact is, both parties can do better, but all eyes will be on the new Republican leaders to see if it's more gestures or real actions.
What about a minimum wage that in the last 22 years has been raised by $1.80? That's shameful.
What about changing our election day? Our elections are held on Tuesdays when Americans work, so they have to stand in line early, come late to work, or get off early to vote. Bosses are turned off, and so minorities don't vote. Countries with well over 70 percent voter participation hold elections on weekends. What about holding ours on a Saturday or the same day as Veterans' Day, when people are off work? I tried to get this legislation passed last year, but to no avail.
What about the dream that every mother's son or daughter can run for President? Given the sorry state of our campaign finance laws, unless Bob Johnson runs no African-American has a chance. Almost half of the new members of Congress this year are millionaires, compared to one percent of the general public.
Or what about a job policy that saves minority jobs? Half of U.S. textile workers - the most productive in the worldare minorities, so of the 55, 200 jobs lost in South Carolina since NAFTA, minorities were hit hard.
Trent Lott wasn't even thinking of segregation when he made his remark. There was no intent. As Senator John Kyl said, "He was just trying to make an old man feel good." But a federal case has been made against Lott while ignoring the intentional racism of the November election: like the signs in Louisiana misleading black voters to vote on the wrong day and the Republican Party paying African-American youth $75 to hold signs in black neighborhoods reading "Mary, if you don't respect us, don't expect us." Or the anonymous fliers in black communities in Baltimore warning voters to pay back rent and parking tickets before voting. Or the call to white families in neighborhoods around Bob Jones University in South Carolina saying, "They are bussing them in in droves. You've got to vote now."
Not a peep from President Bush. After all, he revived his faltering campaign in 2000 by going to segregationist Bob Jones University; with supporters charging that John McCain had fathered a black baby.
For President Bush to gain minority support, symbols won't do it. The reaction to the Republican's sacking of Lott and now awareness of racism is much like Eliza Doolittle in "My Fair Lady": "Words, words...I'm sick of words....show me now."